Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy

by Robert A. Wilson

  It is very hard to remember the whole novel or universe because our horns won’t fit the

  Simon stared at the page, losing the meaning of Mooning, forgetting the question itself as attention narrowed to this single page, this paragraph, this hotel room in New York on the morning of December 24, 1983, barely able to remember even a few pages back or a few pages ahead.

  The window closed. The key was no key.

  HAVEN’T YOU HEARD?

  Man’s inexorable though hardly remorseless drive to divinity is taking new, non-institutionalized forms. This comes down to the simplest of propositions: the species must solve the problem of death very soon, blow itself up, or blow its mind.

  —ALAN HARRINGTON, The Immortalist

  When Norma became pregnant Cagliostro turned into the stereotype of an ideal husband, canceling bookings to be with her, joyously supporting her decision to employ natural childbirth, teaching her yoga to supplement the Lamaze conditioning techniques employed by her obstetrician. He filled her room with flowers—and with photographs of the moon. (Some of his occult studies were involved here, she realized.)

  One night the phone rang, and when Crane answered it Epicene Wildeblood purred, “I’m in Hollywood for a week and I guessed you might want to see me.”

  “You guessed wrong,” Crane said. “Sorry. New trip this year.”

  Norma’s labor began prematurely, and the doctor quickly discovered that the baby was in the breech position. After a few hours he realized this childbirth could never be natural. She accepted the ether and he performed a Caesarean, only to find the infant, in turning, had strangled on its umbilical cord.

  “Oh, God,” she said when she awoke and the doctor told her. “Oh, what a lousy God to make a world like this.”

  Cagliostro was caught by a gaggle of reporters coming out of the hospital. “How do you feel?” was the first question.

  “How the hell do you think I feel?”

  “Where will the service be held?”

  “There will be no religious service!” Cagliostro shouted, hopping into a cab. “Haven’t you fools heard yet?—God is dead!” It made headlines, and inspired editorials. One editorial—“Bereavement Is No Excuse for Blasphemy”—came to the attention of a fourteen-year-old boy, John Disk, who was tormented by desires which his priests told him were evil.

  When Cagliostro returned to the clubs his act had changed considerably. The mildly satirical patter between escapes had become bitingly mordant—“He’s a new Lenny Bruce!”—and entirely centered around his declared philosophy of anarchism and atheism. The escapes themselves changed each night, because he explained them and showed how they were done as the climax of every performance.

  “Now you know how I fooled you,” he would say. “Try to figure out on your own how your congressmen and clergymen fool you. There is no restraint that isn’t self-imposed: you are all absolutely free.”

  The evening after the newspapers broke the story that he and Norma had joined Joan Baez in refusing to pay taxes, a drunk began heckling him during his act: “Why don’t you go back to Russia, you Commie dope fiend!” That sort of thing.

  “No man living hates socialism more than me,” Cagliostro said intensely.

  He and Norma were busted for possession of acid a few weeks later. “This is hard to fix,” his lawyer told him. “You’re too notorious now. The only chance I see is for you to vow to reform, lament the error of your ways, and promise to go on a lecture tour speaking to teenagers about the evils of drugs. Then maybe I can get you a minimum sentence. Maybe.” Hugh’s old friend, the Boston psychologist, was in exile in Nepal, having fled a thirty-year sentence in Texas; political offenders in general were having a rough time in the United States.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  The very next week he led the show-biz contingent among the protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention. A photograph of him being tear-gassed outside the Chicago Hilton is still reprinted whenever an article about him appears.

  “You’ve had it,” his lawyer told him. “As an officer of the court, I can’t tell you what I really think. An unethical attorney, were he here, would frankly advise you and Norma to get the hell out of the country.”

  But a change came over Unistat when Hubert Humphrey, the new President, withdrew all the troops from Vietnam and began granting amnesty to political prisoners. Cagliostro and Norma, in the midst of the return to liberalism, received suspended sentences for the acid, and he was not tried with the Chicago Nine for conspiring the convention riots. The IRS raided their bank account for the tax money instead of prosecuting them, and, by 1970, he was listed as one of ten top money-makers in show biz. His escapes were, the American Society of Magicians announced in an award, better than Houdini’s; his habit of explaining each “miracle” after the performance only built up crowd interest for the next challenge.

  BUMP IN THE NIGHT

  Sput Sputnik was sleeping alone at last. Visions of dollar signs danced in his head as he dreamed of a miniature sled full of barrels of beer. She nu it, he had it, Ra Hoor cooed it, right jolly old selves, but overall there was a smell of fried onions, because of janes chains gains clanking up and down again.

  Sput turned in the bed, moaning slightly, as the brains danes chains came clanking back and forth again.

  And there was a Russian spy named Igor Beeforshot, and there was Minor Boulevard and Major Strasse, because every Pershing comes to Gricks, but the chains mains pains were clanking in and out again.

  Hoor’s looking for you, cad! It was a wide house, a mason blanc, a cozy bianca, but still there were cranes cranes cranes flapping overhead again. So he sput the roavin ovamor and

  He was abruptly awake, in the dark, still hearing the chains. Something was bumping and thumping at his door, something that seemed to be dragging chains behind it.

  Sput was not into the S-M scene, and everybody in the mansion knew better than to come banging at his door when he was asleep. But still the thumping and the bumping and the chain-rattling continued.

  He was wide awake now, and he knew it was no dream. Something eldritch and unholy, right out of Gothic fiction, was banging at his bedroom door.

  And then, for the first time in his life, he actually heard an eerie laugh, just like in the books, and It was actually coming through the door, walking right through solid wood, a greenish oldish spectral chain-rattling Thing.

  “Jesus Nelly!” Sput gasped. This sort of goings-on only happened in books, not in real life.

  “Sput Sputnik,” came the hollow voice (right out of an echo chamber, he thought).

  “Yes?” he breathed, wondering if his hairs were standing on end, too, in orthodox fashion.

  “Sput Sputnik,” said the Presence, “I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

  THE EYE-ON-THE-PYRAMID

  A biological breakthrough will force a new militancy, a new crusade. “Make the world safe for Immortality,” will be the cry.

  —SEGERBERG, The Immortality Factor

  On May 1, 1976, Cagliostro and Norma were in Mexico City on a vacation. At lunch she held up a twenty-centavo piece and said, “Isn’t that the same as the design on back of the dollar?”

  “It’s Masonic,” he said. “The Mexican and American revolutionaries were both predominantly Freemasons.”

  “What does it mean, anyway—an eye floating above a pyramid?”

  He started to explain about the Third Eye and the pineal gland, and then noticed that she wasn’t listening.

  “They’re waiting for you,” she said in a mediumismic voice.

  John Disk, in 1984, read Cagliostro’s notes on the next three days very carefully:

  “I refused to believe it. I put her to every possible test, whenever the voice spoke. Looking for evidence of autosuggestion and self-hypnosis, I found evidence of autosuggestion and self-hypnosis—naturally! I also found seventeen things I couldn’t explain. Most central was the fact that the message, when I finally encouraged her
, came in Enochian, a language which nobody understands since all we possess are the nineteen fragments received by Dee and Kelly in the seventeenth century. Yet she gave me nineteen new fragments, and translated them, and the grammar and vocabulary are consistent with the Dee-Kelly scryings. Even if she had studied the Dee and Kelly fragments (which she swears she hasn’t), concocting new sentences in that unknown language would be beyond the power of any human brain or even of any known computer….”

  The nineteen fragments of Enochian, translated by Norma in the same trance in which the fragments arrived, became the nineteen chapters of The Aquarian Gospel. Crane wrote in the introduction:

  “It is impossible to doubt that these are the communications of a superior intelligence. If the reader is, as I am [thank God!], an atheist, the identity of that intelligence will pose severe mysteries. Is it interplanetary—or interstellar? A being leaping across Time from some more advanced future, or past [Atlantis]? Does it come from dimensions tangent to, but not identical with, our own? I propose no answer to these questions, but I am sure that this intelligence, or others like it, sent the messages which founded the great religions of the past, and that such communications are the foundation of the belief in beings called ‘gods.’ …”

  Norma was killed in an automobile accident the day the book was published. “What further proof do we need,” a prominent clergyman wrote in his syndicated newspaper column, “that this foul and obscene ‘revelation’ comes from a source not divine, but diabolical?”

  Crane’s first—and only—failure to escape from a challenge box occurred one month later.

  The eye operation came later that year. “I can save one,” the doctor told him, “but not both.”

  “A blind magician is worse off than a deaf musician, and I’m not Beethoven,” Crane said simply. “Do the best you can.”

  He retained the sight of one eye.

  “Much as we are inclined to sympathize,” the New York Daily News editorialized, “we do admit to a strong feeling that there is divine retribution in the tragedies befalling drug-cultist Cagliostro ‘the Great.’”

  The Aquarian Gospel was burned by a citizens’ group in Cicero, Illinois, that week.

  “These powers, whoever and whatever they are,” Crane wrote—in unpublished notes which John Disk read years later, weeping—“are determined that I abandon all else and become no more than the servant who carries their message. To this end, they are taking away from me, one by one, all the things I love. Or, perhaps, I am merely in the terminal stages of a long-brewing paranoid psychosis?”

  Hugh Crane celebrated his fourteenth birthday in 1938 by climbing into the bed of the family’s black maid, Sophie Hagé, who introduced him to Voudon.

  The group in Harlem at that time actually combined elements of Voudon and Masonry. Since Voudon was already a blend of European witchcraft and African magic, and Masonry is a mixture of elements from Rosicrucian mysticism and French revolutionary free thought, there were actually four traditions involved, and the Rite of Initiation was unique. Borrowed from the third degree of Masonry, it replaced Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum with the Grand Zombi, and, since marijuana was involved, the ordeal became as real as in those days when candidates knew they would be killed if they failed.

  In a dark cellar on 110th Street, the Grand Zombi demanded, “Reveal the Secret Word or I will kill you. Reveal the Secret Word and give up your quest for Truth and Power.”

  Hugh, repeating the formula taught him, replied, “Kill me if you must, but I will search again for Truth and Power as soon as I am reborn.”

  The Grand Zombi, black face above a black robe, raised his sword. “Do you fear me now, mortal?” he screamed.

  “I have eternity to work in,” Hugh replied, according to rote. “Why should I fear?”

  “Then die!” screamed the Zombi—the part of the Rite which had not been explained to the candidate in advance—and Hugh felt the sword cross his neck and saw the blood spurting.

  He also saw the bulb which the Zombi squeezed to make the blood spurt out of the end of the sword.

  And he understood the manufacture of reality and power completely.

  TRANSFORMATION

  DECEMBER 24, 1983:

  Marvin Gardens was awake again; the downers hadn’t fully taken the edge off the coke excitation.

  He had turned the radio on, but the only thing worth listening to was Handel’s Messiah—the fourth time he had caught parts of it this week—and they were in the middle of “He was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” Not quite what he needed at this hour, with the early morning Manhattan permeation of suicides and accidental overdoses skulking in the shadows. He wished they would get on to the Hallelujah Chorus.

  Marvin found a book he’d never finished—The Autobiography of Cagliostro the Great. He opened at random and started reading:

  “Get a a job,” my father said. Turning back, I saw the beggar falling to the ground, obviously fainting from starvation, but when he landed I knew, from his limpness, that it was more than a faint: that he was dead.

  It has sometimes occurred to me that there is a parallel here to the famous experience of the Buddha, who, like myself, had the misfortune to be born rich and only discovered what life is like for most people when he encountered a beggar and a corpse. Is this parallel an accident? I am not sure: I cannot say when I was elected, or drafted, to receive the Aquarian message, the great affirmation that “All is joy,” in contrast to the Buddha’s equally true, equally false, but now obsolete “All is sorrow.”

  We never see what is in front of our eyes. My father did not see what happened inside me when that beggar died; I have brought men and women to the edge of the Vision, by various tactics, and they, afraid to see it, ran off to psychiatrists.

  “It’s really very simple to remember the order of the ten planets,” Blake Williams explained to Natalie.”Just memorize the sentence ‘Mother Very Easily Made a Jam Sandwich Using No Peanuts Mayonnaise or Glue.’ Got it?”

  “Mother Very Easily Made a Jam Sandwich Using No Peanuts Mayonnaise or Glue,” Natalie repeated dubiously.

  “That’s all,” Williams said proudly. “You just use the initial letter of each word as a mnemonic, and you’ve got all ten planets. Mercury Venus Earth Mars the asteroids Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto Mickey and Goofy.”

  “Wow!” said Natalie. “Disneyland in the skies.”

  “Who the hell was that?” Carol Christmas asked breathlessly, as the triangle finally faded. “Sure didn’t look like a loa to me,” she added, frowning thoughtfully.

  “It was Simon Moon,” Joe Malik said, also somewhat breathless. “I knew him in another universe … or another novel … or something….”

  Carol stared at him. “You wigging?” she asked bluntly.

  “No,” Joe said. “I think I’m beginning to understand the trap we’re all caught in, and how to get out of it.”

  DAMNANT QUOD NON INTELLIGUNT

  God told John Disk to kill Cagliostro the Great. It was that simple; after all, who would dare to disobey the Voice of God Himself?

  God had been talking to Disk for nearly a year now. The Voice had been rather faint at first, and John even thought it was the Devil for a while, because it kept telling him he was damned. It said he was damned because he sinned sometimes when he was asleep. It said many silly and blasphemous things, but John realized later that those weirdities had been the Devil trying to jam and confuse the communication, for when the Voice became strong and constant, there was no doubt at all that it was God.

  It told John that he had been especially selected because of his virtue and purity, and it never mentioned what happened sometimes when he was asleep. It told him he was the only twenty-three-year-old male virgin in Unistat, the last true Christian not perverted by Pussycat and the Sexual Revolution and Black Magic. It told him he had earned much merit in Heaven for his selfless activities on behalf of the antiabortion movement in the 1970s and White Heroes Opposing Re
d Extremism since then.

  It really loved John, and it never stopped telling him he was the most important man on the planet because he had been Selected.

  At first it didn’t tell him what he had been Selected for; but every time he read a news story about some new blasphemy by Cagliostro the Great, the Voice of God would say, “This man must be stopped.”

  It was only toward the end of November that the Voice became increasingly explicit and said directly that he, John Disk, had been Selected to terminate the foul existence of the infamous devil-worshiper Cagliostro. Even then the Voice was almost drowned out by the voice of Rhoda Chief, the Scarlet Woman of Rock, chanting, “Hickory dickory dock, I’d like to suck your cock,” and other diabolical voices howling “no wife, no horse, no mustache” and “sit down when you want to pee” and other nonsense like that. The Devil was trying very hard to keep Disk from hearing and believing the Word of God; he wanted Disk to think he was going crazy. But the Voice of God got louder and more powerful and drowned out the others, and nobody who heard it, Disk knew, could ever doubt that a Voice so wise and powerful was anything else but that of the Lord God Himself.

  John made sure, of course. He spent a whole night praying, beating his back with a bundle of wet, stinging cords, just like he’d read in a book about the saints from the public library on Forty-second Street. He kept saying, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.” At dawn Jesus appeared, with a halo, and told him exactly how to find a pawn shop where he could buy a gun without the legal impediment of acquiring a permit. Then He turned into a huge red triangle, through which the impassive face of a lion stared at John, and then it was all mirrors and blue smoke until he actually found the pawn shop and got the pistol.

  The Devil was determined to protect his servant, Cagliostro, so John found the mirrors and smoke increasingly getting in his way in the following days. He would be on his way to Theology class at Fordham when suddenly all around would be thousands of hippies of all nations and a voice would be singing